The attempt would be too daring. Who invented shaved heads and monkish
gowns and habits, we cannot tell, but this we know: long before Father
Bury saw and described those things in China, there existed in India the
Grand Lama or head monk, with monasteries under him, filled with monks
who kept the three vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. They had
their routine of prayers, of fasts and of labors, like the Christian
monks of the middle ages.

Among the Greeks there were many philosophers who taught ascetic
principles. Pythagoras, born about 580 B.C., established a religious
brotherhood in which he sought to realize a high ideal of friendship.
His whole plan singularly suggests monasticism. His rules provided for a
rigid self-examination and unquestioning submission to a master. Many
authorities claim that the influence of the Pythagorean philosophy was
strongly felt in Egypt and Palestine, after the time of Christ. "Certain
it is that more than two thousand years before Ignatius Loyola assembled
the nucleus of his great society in his subterranean chapel in the city
of Paris, there was founded at Crotona, in Greece, an order of monks
whose principles, constitution, aims, method and final end entitle them
to be called 'The Pagan Jesuits[B].'"

[Footnote B: Appendix, Note B.]

The teachings of Plato, no doubt, had a powerful monastic influence,
under certain social conditions, upon later thinkers and upon those who
yearned for victory over the flesh. Plato strongly insisted on an ideal
life in which higher pleasures are preferred to lower. Earthly thoughts
and ambitions are to yield before a holy communion with the Divine. Some
of his views "might seem like broken visions of the future, when we
think of the first disciples who had all things in common, and, in later
days, of the celibate clergy, and the cloisteral life of the religious
orders." The effect of such philosophy in times of general corruption
upon those who wished to acquire exceptional moral and intellectual
power, and who felt unable to cope with the temptations of social life,
may be easily imagined. It meant, in many cases, a retreat from the
world to a life of meditation and soul-conflict. In later times it
exercised a marked influence upon ascetic literature.

Coming closer to Christianity in time and in teaching, we find a Jewish
sect, called Essenes, living in the region of the Dead Sea, which bore
remarkable resemblances to Christian monastici